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War, Ethics and Values: An Interview with Brad Hirschfield
As America goes to war, ethical
challenges press to the fore. For some, the war is a simple matter of good versus evil,
and evil must be destroyed. For others, the moral situation is much more complex and the
proper response is more uncertain. Dr.
Michael Gottsegen, Editor-in-Chief of eCLAL, spoke
with Rabbi Brad Hirschfield recently about the moral complexity of the present moment and
in particular about the morality of the war we are presently waging. Excerpts from this interview follow.
What is this war about for you? Is it a war between
civilizations, a war of religion, or a war of values?
BH:
I believe we’re fighting for a culture in which we
can ask questions about the moral legitimacy of attacking civilian targets and they are
fighting for a culture in which you can’t ask these kinds of questions, and
that’s why I think this war needs to be fought and not just with words. For this reason, as horrifying and nauseating as
the prospect is, I can accept that a lot of people are going to die. The principles
involved are that important. Declaring this fight to be between good and evil or between
the innocent and the guilty does not really get us all that far. For me this fight is
animated by and in defense of the values of democracy, political debate and pluralism, the
values of individual liberty and of an open society. It is these values that I believe do,
in the end, make this a great country despite all its problems.
It is important right now to be clear
about our values and about the values that we believe to be of such importance that they
are worth fighting for, and killing for, and dying for.
Our fight is not only on behalf of
our core values. These values must animate the fight directly and inform the manner in
which the war is conducted. If they do not, though we may win the battle against the
Taliban, we will lose the larger war because we will have allowed the world to be divided
between one form of absolutism and another. That
is exactly what our enemy wants and it would render their claims more plausible. We must
be true to our values and, if we are, we shall win. Coercion
ultimately must fail; repression ultimately must fail. The question is: Are we going to
stand by and allow the processes to play out and take hundreds of years and cost millions
of lives, or are we actually going to stand up and say that those values – not some
abstract notion of good and evil, but those values -- demand our commitment, require our
sacrifice?
What I celebrate about America is
that the many strands of the American people can own the nation’s commitment to
freedom, democracy and pluralism on the basis of their own inherited traditions and
world-views, and that what we share is our commitment to these principles that animate
this country. What we share is the readiness to stand up and say that we will fight for
human dignity even when it expresses itself in ways with which we disagree. What the other
side is saying is: “Oh yes, we believe in human dignity -- until it violates our
personal construction of it and then we have to destroy it.”
Now the question of the moment is
whether the American people, a people which in its domestic life regards every individual
life as sacred, can engage in a fight in a manner that does not lose sight of this
sacredness, a sacredness that even extends to the lives of our enemies.
Many religious people oppose this war on the grounds that it is wrong to take life when doing so can be avoided. The argument is analogous to that which is made against the death penalty for murderers. If it is wrong to take a life, how can it be right to take the life of any individual even if he is a murderer? Can two wrongs make a right?
Now here’s the thing: the Bible
declares not “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” but “Thou Shalt Not Murder” –
and the rest of human life is a matter of wrestling with that challenge that creating a
just world does sometimes demand violence and we don’t have the luxury of keeping our
hands clean our whole life. The question is how do we live with the fact that sometimes we
must shed blood.
In thinking about this I go back to Genesis 9, when God speaks to Noah after the flood
at the moment in which the world is refounded, not the idyllic world of Eden but the real
world in which we live today. In Genesis 9:6,
God declares that humans cannot be killed because human beings are created in the image of
God, that killing them constitutes murder and that whosoever murders another human being
must be killed. But the murderer, too, is created in the image of God, so how can God
command that the murderer be killed? If we
are all created in the image of God and that is the foundation for saying that you
can’t murder – then how can the right response to murder be to kill the killer?
We know that some traditions,
particularly in the East, regard all killing as murder, believing that killing injures not
only the individual who is killed, but the killer as well and the world as a whole. In the West, most of us reject this view and
believe that murder – the illicit taking of life -- is one thing and that killing in
self-defense or in order to punish someone who has committed murder is another. At the same time, we who believe that killing is
sometimes justified need to be mindful of the need to draw moral distinctions, lest we
wield the power of the sword in an unreflective or indiscriminate manner.
There is killing and there is murder.
In either case, a life is taken. Wherein does the essential difference lie? In a formal or
juridical sense, the difference is that one is licit (legal, permitted) and one is illicit
(illegal, impermissible). On a deeper level, however, the ethical basis of the distinction
between the two is whether or not the taking of life respects or violates the human
dignity – or the image of God -- of the person whose life is being taken. The murderer is a murderer then presumably not
because he takes a life, but because he takes a life and thereby violates the dignity of
the life he takes. The challenge for us in dealing with him – while not flinching
from taking the life of that person who took the life of another – is to take his life in a manner that does
not violate the dignity of his person as he violated the dignity of the one whose life he
took. When we take his life, when we kill
him, we must not desecrate the image of God which he continues to bear.
Now I know this may sound incredibly
facile and may mean nothing at all in practice. Or it could mean that, being mindful of
this, we will wrestle every step of the way with the questions of “Why am I doing
this?” “How am I doing this?” “What are the effects of my doing
this?” without wrapping ourselves in the mantle of good conscience which tells us
that our enemy is evil, that he has forfeited his right to live and that there is nothing
more for us to think about.
But what has any of this to do with
the present conflict between America and Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and the Taliban? It seems to me that a lot of the discussion of
guilt and innocence and of good and evil gets us nowhere because these terms are only
given meaning by the values which they embody. When a minister says to me that the
greatest sacrilege is the murder of the innocent in the name of redemption, I agree. But I
also know that the people who flew those airplanes into the WTC and into the Pentagon
would agree with him. In their opinion, the people they killed were not innocent. And so
words like innocent and guilty don’t help too much. Nor does it get us too far to
call them crazy. “Crazy how?” is the question. Because they twist and misuse
religion and claim Allah’s support for their holy war? In all honesty, are we so very
different in this regard? Two weeks ago, I took my kids for a Shabbos walk and around the
corner from our house, we saw a big American flag hanging out of the second story window
of a neighbor’s house with the words “GOD IS WITH US,” spelled out in
masking tape, emblazoned upon it. It made me
shake inside to see this and I asked myself whether this is so different from the claim
that these monsters make -- and I say monsters, which is not helpful, but that’s what
I feel. They invoke God to fight their cause. We invoke God to fight our cause and we meet
on a battlefield somewhere in the 12th century.
Does the “Just War” tradition have anything to contribute to our reflection upon how we should pursue our ends?
The “just war” conversation
that most theologians are intent upon seems to me to be the exact opposite of the
conversation we should be having. The “just war” discussion is typically an
exercise in probabilistic casuistry that aims at alleviating any qualms of conscience that
we might have about our decision to go to war and regarding the manner in which it is
prosecuted. In short, it aims at helping us to feel good about the war that we’re
going to make and about how we intend to fight it. This exercise is not a bad thing, and
it is good to be concerned about such matters, but if our moral/religious investigation of
the matter stops here, as it often does, the most important thing will not be explored.
The typical approach is too objective and too outwardly directed. It focuses on the war
– and it focuses on the enemy – but it fails to focus on our own motivations and
intentions, as if the process of reflection were completed when it has been determined
that the war is just and our enemy evil. And yet, it seems to me that if the process ends
at this point, its work is only half done. Engaging
in critical self-reflection and making war cannot be separated as if they were two
discontinuous stages in a process such that the former is a preliminary exercise to be
gotten out of the way as quickly as possible. It must be possible to go to war without
putting the process of self-examination on hold. Some would claim that moral reflection
and strong action do not mix, that they are antagonistic in essence and mutually exclusive
at any given moment. This I reject in principle even as I accept that soldiers who are
directly engaged in the heat of combat may not have the luxury of reflecting on what they
are doing or are about to do for longer than a moment.
What are the moral dangers in
fighting this war? What values are at stake?
There is a red line between
destroying your enemy as a matter of moral and political necessity and celebrating that
destruction. A story from the Midrash captures this distinction. The story, as the rabbis
tell it, is about the angels who are looking down from heaven at the moment when God is
drowning Pharaoh and his armies in the Red Sea. The angels are overjoyed at the sight and
they’re singing songs of praise, but God, upon hearing them, tells them be silent.
How can you sing when my creatures are dying, God cries. Of course, the paradox here is
that the Holy One who tells them to be silent because God’s creatures are dying is at
the same time the Holy One who is drowning the Egyptians in the sea. So the point is not
that God is morally opposed to their destruction. Rather,
it seems that God (and the rabbis) do not want our understanding of the occasional moral
necessity of killing to give rise to a celebration of the deeds it compels us to do.
If we are mindful of the humanity
of our enemies, we will presumably wage war upon them in a different manner than we would
otherwise. It seems to me that a step in the same direction is the care that the U.S.
government has taken to differentiate between the Afghan government and the terrorists of
al Qaeda (our enemies) and the Afghan people (our friends). Our quarrel (and fight) is
with the former alone, not with the latter. So we drop bombs on the first group and food
packets for everyone else. This is surely an approach that is to be applauded.
BH: I
am not so sure. It seems to me based on a fantasy that refuses to acknowledge the
realities of war. I worry about the change in American public opinion that will come when
the real magnitude of collateral damage becomes known. What if we decide the war is not
worth fighting? That would be a terrible mistake. The war will still be worth fighting
even after CNN starts to show us images of innocent people who have been maimed and burned
by U.S. bombing. But will we have the stomach
for continuing once those images are staring us in the face? I am not so sure. We have
made the war palatable to ourselves so far by imagining that a war can be fought in such a
manner that only the evil ones – the inhuman ones, the terrorists and their
supporters -- are burned, maimed or killed. Everyone else is deemed to be innocent, so
we’re not supposed to hurt them at all.
Isn’t this distinction a step
in the right direction?
BH:
It may not be. What if it turns out that it’s not
progress and makes us recoil from what we must do to win this war because we don’t
have the stomach to fight a war in which lots of people who we would like to think of as
fully innocent are getting hurt or killed?
It seems to me that we are at once
both too insensitive to the injury we inflict upon our enemies and overly sensitive to the
collateral damage, to the injury, that war imposes on civilians and non-combatants who
happen to be in close proximity to the field of battle.
If only we could fight a war in a
manner that targets with such precision that only the guilty are afflicted while the
innocent are spared. But in war there is no way to maintain that kind of precision. We
should be horrified by the horrors of war, but must not be so horrified at the horrors of
war that we come to the conclusion that no war is worth fighting because some wars are,
indeed, worth fighting. As Genesis 9 tells us,
sometimes we must kill because murderers cannot be allowed to go unpunished.
I’ll grant you that murderers must be punished for their crimes. But in a world in which the guilty and the innocent dwell in such close proximity that the “punishment” of the former will necessarily bring suffering to the latter as well, it seems to be morally incumbent upon us to ask how far we should go in the pursuit of a legitimate goal if this pursuit is going to bring great suffering to people whom you do not regard as being in any way guilty, in any way culpable, or in any way responsible. I think the magnitude of that cost to innocents is legitimately factored into the decision of whether to go to war and into the tactical decisions as to how the war is to be waged.
You are saying that it is a
utopian fantasy that will stand in the way of doing what needs to be done.
BH:
But I also fear that once we find that we cannot fight
without killing the innocent, that we will decide that the innocent are not so innocent
after all and we’ll end up dehumanizing an entire people to allay our bad conscience
about sweeping away the innocent with the guilty.
So in the end we come up against two
equally distorted approaches. Either we tell ourselves we’ll only get the bad guys
– which leads us to demand an end to the war when we find that war does not
distinguish between the innocent and the guilty – or we tell ourselves that they are
all inhuman and regard every Afghani living under Taliban rule, from five year old
children to Mullah Omar, equally as the bad guys. There must be a third alternative.
Both sides have invoked God in
this conflict, which is typical of the role religion plays in international conflict. Does
religion have anything to contribute besides the pious declaration that God is on our
side?
I disagree strongly with the
politically correct claim that what those terrorists did had nothing to do with Islam. It
had everything to do with Islam. Now,
it’s not the only way to read Islam, but it is a legitimate reading of that
tradition. It came out of madrasas and teachers
and a culture that moved in that direction, just as the murder of Prime Minister Rabin
came out of a serious reading of the Jewish tradition that has strong cultural roots,
revered teachers and established institutions behind it. And you can as little wish the
former away by declaring that it’s not real Islam as you can wish away Jewish
fundamentalism by saying, “Oh, that’s not really Jewish.”
Lucky for us, however, the
fundamentalists need not have the last word in defining the relevance of religion at this
hour. Religion has another – and more positive -- role to play in shaping a
contemporary American culture that is able to meet the ethical challenges that we face in
a time of war. Jews, in particular, are heirs to a tradition that shows us how to remain
ethically aware without becoming politically and militarily paralyzed. I think there is a
real contribution that Jews can make to America, at this moment, because we have long
understood that for the sake of building and preserving a society that embodies the
ethical values we hold sacred, we are required to do things that are not always nice and
not always pretty. But we also know that we
have to do these things in a manner that remains self-aware and self-critical.
To view other articles by Brad Hirschfield, click here.
